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Mother Goose and Grimm, 5/21/26

OK, I guess I respect the Mother Goose and Grimm entries where the strip remembers that part of its remit is doing riffs on fairytales, and I guess I count the public domain monsters that Universal Studios has been intermittently trying to turn into a “Dark Universe” franchise for more than a decade as being in the same ballpark as fairytale characters, but nothing about this works. Like having Dracula (I mean that could be any vampire, I guess, but you get it) ask this question makes sense superficially but honestly I feel like it raises more questions than it answers. Is he mad about this or is that just his face? Why are they hanging out together in the first place? And his question is legitimate! And it doesn’t get a good answer! And is that just a regular human lady waitress, like does she work at a lunch counter specifically for monsters or does she just have blood on tap for the regulars? And why isn’t Frankenstein’s monster doing the “Me take cup blood!”-type diction? And why does Dracula say “why” when he clearly should be saying “vhy?”

Crankshaft, 5/21/26

Sorry I got so worked up there, but since I’m already worked up, I might as well break my silence on the fact that Crankshaft has descended into endless interviews with transparent authorial self-insert character “Batton Thomas.” Normally I’d let this indulgence slide without comment but now they’re showing “Batton’s” characters from his “Three O’Clock High” strip like Harry Dinkle, who has already migrated to the current iteration of Crankshaft! We’re in danger of tearing through the walls of the Funkyverse, and I think the time-travelling janitor who arranged for Summer Moore to save humanity needs to pop through a portal here and execute everyone involved Terminator-style before it’s too late.

The Phantom, 5/21/26

Hey, remember Chatu, the infamous Python, the Phantom’s other big antagonist, the one who isn’t Eric Sahara, the infamous Nomad? Well, Chatu has just been kind of chilling in this cage since 2009 or so but, like the Nomad, it seems like he’s about to re-enter the story. Maybe we’ll get a Nomad/Python teamup that will be strong enough to defeat the Phantom once and for all! Or maybe they’ll just realize that the Ghost Who Walks takes up way too much of their mental energy and they’ll simply go do some low-level crimes that won’t attract his attention and leave him be.

Curtis, 5/21/26

A thing that I really love about Curtis is that it’s a strip that’s not afraid to get a little weird with it. The kids gave their teacher a cake for the last day of school, but whoops, the box is full of rats! Lots and lots of rats! What an amusingly odd scenario.

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Beetle Bailey, 5/8/26

I honestly am not sure if the joke here is simply “Lt. Fuzz is humiliated because Gen. Halftrack takes an enlisted soldier’s advice instead of his” (I assume she’s enlisted because she wears the same uniform as Beetle — I’m not sure how that relates to actual U.S. Army uniforms but I’m confident Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC isn’t either) or if there’s another possibility lurking, which is that the General is being agreeable with this soldier because she’s a pretty lady. That’s in character, but it requires us to interpret some ambiguous visual cues — are Halftrack’s eyes particularly bugged out in panel one or am I imagining it? is “blonde” a guaranteed marker of attractiveness in the Baileyverse? — and, maybe it’s mean to say this, but I personally think that it would all be easier to parse if the art in this strip were, you know, good.

Crankshaft, 5/8/26

Ed Crankshaft is old, and someday soon he’s gonna die, and maybe that’ll start with him just being overcome with all-pervasive tiredness as his body shuts down. Now, that’s not happening today, I’m pretty sure, but I am heartened to think that he’ll definitely be making some incomprehensible wordplay while it happens.

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Dick Tracy, 5/3/26

There’s no such thing as the “J. Duveen Art Gallery” (though Joseph Duveen was a famous early 20th century art dealer), but the fictional building so named in this strip appears to be a Frank Gehry design. I’d like to believe that in the Dick Tracy universe, Gehry worked extensively in Neo-Chicago, taking inspiration from the dramatic and abstract skull shapes of the various members of Tracy’s rogues gallery.

Mary Worth, 5/3/26

Not a lot of new stuff in this Sunday recap of the recap, but I do like how languorous Mary and Toby look in that hot tub. Mary is so relaxed she can’t even bring herself to lift her hands out of the water to make air quotes around “relationship” and “girlfriend”! Anyway, I admit this plot has been fun but I’m hoping that the Sunday quote from martial arts master Jet Li presages an upcoming storyline that’s a bit more dynamic.

Crankshaft, 5/3/26

Crankshaft did a strip about hot flashes, and it didn’t make a pun or wordplay of any kind about them, and you can tell from Ed’s picture here that he’s absolutely furious about it. “If I had been there, it wouldn’t have went down like it did,” he’s thinking. “I would’ve malaproped ‘menopause’ so intensely that people would be talking about it for years.”